The Christmas Thief

by Mary Higgins Clark

  He put the tray on the coffee table and picked up the bubble-wrapped package. With a firm thrust he pulled apart the adhesive seals and unwound the wrapping. His expression of anticipation changed to surprise and then amazement.

  “How much money have we got invested with the Four M’s?” he asked.

  Alvirah told him.

  “Honey, take a look. They sent us a jar of maple syrup. That’s their idea of a Christmas present?”

  “They’ve got to be kidding,” Alvirah exclaimed, shaking her head as she took the jar from him. Then she read the label. “Willy, look,” she exclaimed. “They didn’t give us just a jar of syrup. They gave us a tree! It says so right here. ‘This syrup comes from the tree reserved for Willy and Alvirah Meehan. Please come and tap your tree to refill this jar when it is empty.’ I wonder where the tree is.”

  Willy began rummaging through the gift-wrapped box that had contained the jar. “Here’s a paper. No, it’s a map.” He studied it and began to laugh. “Honey, here’s something else we can do when we’re in Stowe. We can look up our tree. From the way it looks here, it’s right near the Trapp family property.”

  The phone rang. It was Regan Reilly calling from Los Angeles. “All set for Vermont?” she asked. “No backing out now, promise?”

  “Not a chance, Regan,” Alvirah assured her. “I’ve got business in Stowe. I’m going to look up a tree.”

  3

  Regan, you must be exhausted,” Nora Regan Reilly said with concern, as she looked fondly across the breakfast table at her only child. To others, beautiful raven-haired Regan might be a superb private investigator, but to Nora, her thirty-one-year-old daughter was still the little girl she would give her life to protect.

  “She looks okay to me,” Luke Reilly observed as he set down his coffee cup with the decisive gesture that said he was on his way. His lanky six-foot-five frame was encased in a midnight blue suit, white shirt, and black tie, one of the half-dozen such outfits in his possession. Luke was the owner of three funeral homes in northern New Jersey, which was the reason for his need for subdued clothing. His handsome head of silver hair complemented his lean face, which could look suitably somber but always broke into a ready smile outside his viewing rooms. Now that smile encompassed both his wife and his daughter.

  They were at the breakfast table in the Reilly home in Summit, New Jersey, the home in which Regan had grown up and where Luke and Nora still lived. It was also the place where Nora Regan Reilly wrote the suspense novels that had made her famous. Now she got up to kiss her husband good-bye. Ever since he’d been kidnapped a year ago, he never walked out the door without her worrying that something might happen to him.

  Like Regan, Nora had classic features, blue eyes, and fair skin. Unlike Regan, she was a natural blond. At five feet three, she was four inches shorter than her daughter and towered over by her husband.

  “Don’t get kidnapped,” she said only half-jokingly. “We want to leave for Vermont no later than two o’clock.”

  “Getting kidnapped once in a lifetime is about average,” Regan volunteered. “I looked up the statistics last week.”

  “And don’t forget,” Luke reminded Nora for the hundredth time, “if it wasn’t for my pain and suffering in that little predicament, Regan would never have met Jack and you wouldn’t be planning a wedding.”

  Jack Reilly, head of the Major Case Squad of the New York Police Department and now Regan’s fiancé, had worked on the case when Luke and his young driver vanished. He not only caught the kidnappers and retrieved the ransom, but in the process had captured Regan’s heart.

  “I can’t believe I haven’t seen Jack in two weeks,” Regan said with a sigh as she buttered a roll. “He wanted to pick me up at Newark Airport this morning, but I told him I’d take a cab. He had to go into the office to wrap up a few things but he’ll be here by two.” Regan started to yawn. “Those overnight flights make me a little spacey.”

  “On second thought, I would suggest that your mother is right,” Luke said. “You do look as if a couple of hours of sleep would be useful.” He returned Nora’s kiss, rumpled Regan’s hair, and was gone.

  Regan laughed. “I swear he still thinks I’m six years old.”

  “It’s because you’re getting married soon. He’s starting to talk about how he’s looking forward to grandchildren.”

  “Oh, my God. That thought makes me even more tired. I think I will go upstairs and lie down.”

  Left alone at the table, Nora refilled her own cup and opened The New York Times. The car was already packed for the trip. This morning she intended to work at her desk because she wanted to make notes on the new book she was starting. She hadn’t quite decided whether Celia, her protagonist, would be an interior designer or a lawyer. Two different kinds of people, she acknowledged, but as an interior designer it was feasible that Celia would have met her first husband in the process of decorating his Manhattan apartment. On the other hand, if she was a lawyer, it gave a different dynamic to the story.

  Read the paper, she told herself. First lesson of writing: Put the subconscious on power-save until you start staring at the computer. She glanced out the window. The breakfast room looked out onto the now snow-covered lawn and the garden that led to the pool and tennis court. I love it here, she thought. I get so mad at the people who knock New Jersey. Oh, well, as Dad used to say, “When they know better, they’ll do better.”

  Wrapped in her quilted satin bathrobe, Nora felt warm and content. Instead of chasing crooks in Los Angeles, Regan was home and going away with them. She had gotten engaged in a hot air balloon, of all places, just a few weeks ago. Over Las Vegas. Nora didn’t care where or how it happened, she was just thrilled to finally be planning Regan’s wedding. And there couldn’t be a more perfect man for her than wonderful Jack Reilly.

  In a few hours they would be leaving for the beautiful Trapp Family Lodge and would be joined there by their dear friends Alvirah and Willy Meehan. What’s not to like? Nora thought as she flipped to the Metro section of the newspaper.

  Her eye immediately went to the front-page picture of a handsome woman dressed in a long skirt, blouse, and vest and standing in a forest. The caption was “Rockefeller Center Selects Tree.”

  The woman in that picture looks familiar, Nora thought as she skimmed the story.

  An 80-foot blue spruce in Stowe, Vermont, is about to take its place as the world’s most famous Christmas tree this year. It was chosen for its majestic beauty, but as it turned out, it was planted nearly fifty years ago in a forest adjacent to the property owned by the legendary Von Trapp family. Maria von Trapp happened to be walking through the forest when the sapling was planted, and her picture was taken standing next to it. Since the fortieth anniversary of the world’s most successful musical film, The Sound of Music, is about to occur, and since the film emphasizes family values and courage in the face of adversity, a special reception has been planned for the tree on its arrival in New York.

  It will be cut down on Monday morning and then taken on a flatbed to a barge near New Haven and floated down Long Island Sound to Manhattan. Upon its arrival at Rockefeller Center it will be greeted by a choir of hundreds of schoolchildren from all over the city who will sing a medley of songs from The Sound of Music.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Nora said aloud. “They’ll be cutting down the tree while we’re there. What fun it will be to watch.” She began to hum: “ ‘The hills are alive…’ ”

  4

  On that same morning a scant hundred miles away, Packy Noonan woke up with a happy smile plastered on his face.

  “It’s your big day, huh, Packy?” C.R., the racketeer in the next cell, asked sourly.

  Packy could understand the reason for his sullen manner. C.R. was in only the second year of a fourteen-year stretch, and he had not yet adjusted to life behind bars.

  “It’s my big day,” Packy agreed amiably as he packed his few possessions: toiletries, underwear, socks, and a pi
cture of his long-dead mother. He always referred to her lovingly and with tears in his eyes when he spoke in the chapel in his role as a counselor to his fellow inmates. He explained to them that she had always seen the good in him even when he had gone astray, and on her deathbed she told him that she knew he’d turn out to be an upstanding citizen.

  In fact, he hadn’t seen his mother for twenty years before she died. Nor did he see fit to share with his fellow inmates the fact that in her will, after leaving her meager possessions to the Sisters of Charity, she had written, “And to my son, Patrick, unfortunately known as Packy, I leave one dollar and his high chair because the only time he ever gave me any happiness was when he was small enough to sit in it.”

  Ma had a way with words, Packy thought fondly. I guess I got the gift of gab from her. The woman on the parole board had almost been in tears when he had explained at his hearing that he prayed to his mother every night. Not that it had done him any good. He had served every last day of his minimum sentence plus another two years. The bleeding heart had been overruled by the rest of the board, six to one.

  The jacket and slacks he had worn when he arrived at the prison were out of fashion, of course, but it felt great to put them on. And thanks to the money he swindled, they had been custom-made by Armani. As far as he was concerned, he still looked pretty sharp in them—not that they would be in his closet for thirty seconds after he got to Brazil.

  His lawyer, Thoris Twinning, was picking him up at ten o’clock to escort him to the halfway house known as The Castle on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Packy loved the story that in its long history The Castle had twice been an academy for Catholic high school girls. Ma should know that, he thought. She’d think I was defiling the place.

  He was scheduled to stay there for two weeks to reintroduce himself to the world where people actually worked for a living. He understood that there would be group sessions in which the rules about signing in and signing out and the importance of reporting to his parole officer would be explained. He was assured that at The Castle they would be able to find him permanent housing. He could predict that it would be in a crummy rooming house in Staten Island or the Bronx. The counselors would also help him get a job immediately.

  Packy could hardly wait. He knew that the receiver appointed by the Bureau of Securities to try to find the money lost by the investors would probably have him tailed. There was nothing he looked forward to more than the fun of losing that tail. Unlike thirteen years ago when detectives were swarming all over Manhattan looking for him. He was just leaving for Vermont to retrieve the loot and get out of the country when he was arrested. That wasn’t going to happen again.

  It had already been explained to him that as of Sunday he would be allowed to leave The Castle in the morning but had to be back and signed in by dinner time. And he had already figured out exactly how he would shake the nincompoop who was supposed to be following him.

  At ten-forty on Sunday morning, Benny and Jo-Jo would be waiting on Madison and Fifty-first in a van with a ski rack. Then they’d be on their way to Vermont. Following his instructions, Benny and Jo-Jo had rented a farm near Stowe six months ago. The only virtue of the farm was that it had a large if decrepit barn where a flatbed would be housed.

  In the farmhouse the twins had installed an acquaintance, a guy without a record who was incredibly naive and was happy to be paid to house sit for them.

  That way, just in case there were any slips, when the cops were searching for a flatbed with a tree on it, they wouldn’t start looking in places where people lived. There were enough farms with barns that were owned by out-of-town skiers for them to investigate. The skiers usually didn’t arrive until after Thanksgiving.

  I wired the flask of diamonds onto the branch thirteen and a half years ago, Packy thought. A spruce grows about one and a half feet a year. The branch I marked was about twenty feet high at the time. I was standing at the top of the twenty foot ladder. Now that branch should be about forty feet high. Trouble is no regular ladder goes that high.

  That’s why we have to take the whole tree, and if someone with nothing better to do than mind other people’s business asks questions, we can say it’s going to be decorated for the Christmas pageant in Hackensack, New Jersey. Jo-Jo has a fake permit to cut the tree and a phony letter from the mayor of Hackensack, thanking Pickens for the tree, so that should take care of that.

  Packy’s agile brain leaped about to find any flaw in his reasoning but came up dry. Satisfied, he continued to review the plan: Then we get the flatbed into the barn, find the branch where the loot is hidden, and then we’re off to Brazil, cha, cha, cha.

  All of the above was racing through Packy’s mind as he ate his final breakfast at the Federal Correctional Institution and, when it was over, bid a fond farewell to his fellow inmates.

  “Good luck, Packy,” Lightfingered Tom said solemnly.

  “Don’t give up preaching,” a grizzled long-timer urged. “Keep that promise to your mother that you’d set a good example for the young.”

  Ed, the lawyer who had vacated his clients’ trust funds of millions, grinned and gave a lazy wave of his hand. “I give you three months before you’re back,” he predicted.

  Packy didn’t show how much that got under his skin. “I’ll send you a card, Ed,” he said. “From Brazil,” he muttered under his breath as he followed the guard to the warden’s office where Thoris Twinning, his court-appointed lawyer, was waiting.

  Thoris was beaming. “A happy day,” he gushed. “A happy, happy day. And I have wonderful news. I’ve been in touch with your parole officer, and he has a job for you. As of a week from Monday you will be working at the salad bar in the Palace-Plus diner on Broadway and Ninety-seventh Street.”

  As of a week from Monday a bunch of lackeys will be dropping grapes into my mouth, Packy thought, but he turned on the mesmerizing smile that had enchanted Opal Fogarty and some two hundred other investors in the Patrick Noonan Shipping and Handling Company. “My mama’s prayers have been answered,” he said joyfully. His eyes raised to heaven and a blissful expression on his sharp-featured face, he sighed, “An honest job with an honest day’s pay. Just what Mama always wanted for me.”

  5

  My, my, this is such a beautiful car,” Opal Fogarty commented from the back seat of Alvirah and Willy’s Mercedes. “When I was growing up we had a pickup truck. My father said it made him feel like a cowboy. My mother used to tell him it rode like a bucking steer, so she could understand why he felt like a cowboy. He bought it without telling her, and boy was she mad! But I have to say this: It lasted for fourteen years before it stopped dead on the Triborough Bridge during rush hour. Even my father admitted it was time to give up on the truck, and this time my mother went car shopping with him.” She laughed. “She got to pick out the car. It was a Dodge. Daddy made her mad by asking the salesman if a taxi meter was an option.”

  Alvirah turned to look at Opal. “Why did he ask that?”

  “Honey, it’s because Dodge made so many taxis,” Willy explained. “That was funny, Opal.”

  “Dad was pretty funny,” Opal agreed. “He never had two nickels to rub together, but he did his best. He inherited two thousand dollars when I was about eight years old, and somebody convinced him to put it in parachute stock. They said that with all the commercial flying people would be doing, all the passengers would have to wear parachutes. I guess being gullible is genetic.”

  Alvirah was glad to hear Opal laugh. It was two o’clock, and they were on route 91 heading for Vermont. At ten o’clock she and Willy had been packing for the trip and half-watching the television in the bedroom when a news flash caught their attention. It showed Packy Noonan leaving federal prison in his lawyer’s car. At the gate he got out of the car and spoke to the reporters. “I regret the harm I have caused the investors in my company,” he said. Tears welled in his eyes and his lip trembled as he went on. “I understand that I will be working at the salad bar at the Pala
ce-Plus diner, and I will ask that ten percent of my wages be taken to start to repay the people who lost their savings in the Patrick Noonan Shipping and Handling Company.”

  “Ten percent of a minimum wage job!” Willy had snorted. “He’s got to be kidding.”

  Alvirah had rushed to the phone and dialed Opal. “Turn on channel twenty-four!” she ordered. Then she was sorry she had made the call because when Opal saw Packy, she began to cry.

  “Oh, Alvirah, it just makes me sick to think that terrible cheat is as free as a daisy while I’m sitting here thrilled to get a week’s vacation because I’m so tired. Mark my words, he’ll end up joining his pals on the Riviera or wherever they are with my money in their pockets.”

  That was when Alvirah insisted that Opal join them for the long weekend in Vermont. “We have two big bedrooms and baths in our villa,” she said, “and it will do you good to get away. You can help us follow the map and find my tree. There won’t be any syrup coming from it now, but I packed the jar that the stockbrokers sent me. We have a little kitchen so maybe I’ll make pancakes for everyone and see how good the syrup tastes. And I read in the paper that they’ll be cutting down the tree for Rockefeller Center right near where we’re staying. That would be fun to watch, wouldn’t it?”

  It didn’t take much to persuade Opal. And she was already perking up. On the trip to Vermont she made only one comment about Packy Noonan: “I can just see him working at a salad bar in a diner. He’ll probably be sneaking the croutons into his pocket.”

  6

  Sometimes Milo Brosky wished he had never met the Como twins. He had run into them by chance in Greenwich Village twenty years ago when he attended a poets’ meeting in the back room of Eddie’s Aurora. Benny and Jo-Jo were hanging out in the bar.